


Some Time To Complete Myself

by Nevanna



Category: Runaways (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 15:51:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3656088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nico could use some advice now, about what she was supposed to do, and what she’d become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Time To Complete Myself

**Author's Note:**

> This fills the "identity crisis" square for Ladies' Bingo 2014-2015. It assumes knowledge of the first three volumes of Runaways.
> 
> Content warning for death of family members.
> 
> The title is from the song "To Myself I Turned" by Lacuna Coil.

When her mother knocked on the door, Nico’s sewing machine was whirring away and Ebony Seed’s album was pouring into her ears at top volume. She didn’t even notice that she had company until Tina Minoru flicked the lights on and off once… twice… three times.

The message received, Nico removed her headphones. “Yeah?”

“Your dad’s almost done cooking dinner. Come and help set the table.” Tina eyed the pile of black velvet and wine-colored lace draped across her daughter’s sewing table. “What are you making?”

“A coat.” It was supposed to go with the dress she’d finished the week before. “I downloaded the pattern off the Internet. Want to see?”

Tina peered closer. “Sweetie, you’re very talented, but… looking at the way you’ve been expressing yourself lately, I wonder sometimes if everything is all right.”

“I’m fine.” Nico was pretty sure that she knew the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you didn’t always dress like you were headed out to a Halloween party, did you? Sometimes people your age choose a certain… aesthetic… to reflect…”

“The darkness within our souls?” Nico suggested with exaggerated perkiness. She’s heard stories from other kids, in coffee shops and chat rooms, about their parents holding interventions or hustling them into therapy because of the music they listened to or because they wore black for more than three days in a row.

“Or an understanding that the world can be a frightening place sometimes,” Tina said. “I just hope you know that you can talk to me about anything, even things that might seem too scary to deal with. Otherwise, I suppose that there’s no harm in trying on different identities.”

“Mom, if I have a full-on identity crisis…”

“You’ll at least think about telling me?”

“I promise,” Nico said with a sigh.

Tina smiled. “Good girl.”

A week after that conversation, Nico put the finishing touches on the coat, just in time for the fundraising party that she and her parents attended every year. When she fastened the last buckle and glanced in the mirror, she thought that this might be the opposite of a crisis: she felt fully and absolutely like herself.

After her parents died, Nico’s caseworker brought her back to the house where she grew up. When she and her fellow runaways had been in hiding, every memory of this place had been tainted by her parents’ double life: the conversations, the arguments, and the Sunday brunches after church; her father helping her with her homework and her mother’s promise that Nico could always come to her for advice. 

As Nico looked around her old room for the last time, she still wasn’t sure what was worse: believing that their love for her was part of the act, or knowing that it had been the only thing that was real.

She could use some advice now, about what she was supposed to do, and what she’d become. A Goth who no longer found death nearly as enthralling as she used to? A witch whose magic sometimes controlled her instead of the other way around? A would-be vigilante who couldn’t even protect the people closest to her, or keep them together when the authorities were determined to split them apart?

She finished packing what she could, and then reached into her closet for the coat she’d been wearing the night that her life changed forever. No matter many memories this house held – good or bad, real or not – she had stayed in the past long enough.


End file.
